p. 549 | MONKERY by Elder I. E. Kimball

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 9, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 35.

MONKERY.

By Elder I. E. Kimball

BY ELDER I. E. KIMBALL.

[This is article 10 of the series on the apostasy of the early church. Each is independent, but all are connected.]

I HAVE spoken of the blind, fanatical rage which led tens of thousands of men and women to forsake home and the world, renounce the necessaries and comforts of life, for the wilderness, or the monastery, and that this was the highest conception of religion with the Nicene divines. What was this conception?—That the body must in some way be shuffled off, like a man hanging himself, still pleading with God to spare his life. They therefore resorted to fastings and flagellations, to neglect and abuse of body beyond modern comprehension. I have spoken of fasting, and we know that it is commended in Scripture. It remains for us to detect whether this was according to the word of God. Every writer speaks of this part of the discipline with unmeasured praise, and there is nothing in the ancient ascetic memoirs about which so much is said.

As concerning the true doctrine of fasting, the Scripture sets it forth as a means to an end, wherein we can better realize our weakness, our need of him, and by faith lay hold on God's strength and life. But have we in the life or teachings of prophets, of Christ, or of the apostles a precedent for a continued business of fasting year in and out? Are we to understand that fasting is the rule and eating the exception? And do the Scriptures teach that the body is a baneful thing, to be neglected and abused, maltreated and destroyed, so we may "rise into the divine essence"?

With the Nicene Church the "degree of abstinence was the measure of sanctity." If the two days' faster had some sanctity, the three days' faster had more, while he who fasted five days had ascended to the summit of angelic excellence. Then, again, if there was some virtue in eating scantily, he who totally abstained from animal food was nearer to perfection, and whoever abstained wholly from things cooked by fire was a prodigy. To drink may have been, probably was, a necessity; to drink putrid water, a virtue. This is no exaggeration. The totalers of the day ate nothing cooked by fire.

Again, as to the bath. The apostle Paul would have our "bodies washed with pure water" and we to "cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit." Alas, for the heroes of the wilderness! A lady is mentioned

by Palladius who, through a long course of years, washed nothing more than the ends of her fingers, and then when about to partake of the communion. What if the physicians did recommend the bath for the health of the body? Nay, but the stout-hearted ascetic would bruise and kill his body; hence he had no use for the bath.

If to be housed in a monastery was good, he who vowed never to go under a roof was more holy, and he who shut himself up in a tomb, or stood the winter through in a dried-up well, was the spiritual hero. We have most of us read of the weather-beaten Symeon, who is said to have lived thirty-six years on a pillar erected on the summit of a mountain. Hence, he was called the "Stylite;" he never descended but to take another. The fourth pillar was said to be sixty feet in height, and only three feet broad; here he remained for fifteen years under the sweltering sun and the frozen sky, summer and winter alike. He prayed till three P.M., then harangued the multitudes that flocked to him till dark. He spent much of his time in the exemplary exercise of bowing so low as to touch his toes. Theodoret says he counted one thousand two hundred and forty-four bows, made continuously, and then, being more wearied with counting than the saint with performing, he desisted. Symeon ate only on Sundays (if we may believe the report).

All seemed bent upon subduing the propensity for sleep. We have an example of this in the ermite Dorotheus, who occupied a little stone hut on the seashore for sixty years, spending his days in gathering stones from the shore and constructing cells for the accommodation of others. This "saint" during the night, and without intermission, platted ropes of palm leaves. He was scarcely ever known to lie down, sitting erect the night through at his work, dozing only at his meals. His daily rations were six ounces of bread and a bunch of raw herbs and water. Once Palladius, who was with this saint in his youth, tried to persuade him to sleep, but he took it in ill part. Said he, "Persuade the angels to sleep, and then try what you can do with a man intent upon his purpose." All the cuttings and blisterings with hot irons when there are risings of sinful flesh, all the use of iron girdles and heavy weights carried upon the shoulders, exactly parallel the Buddhist monks, who carry heavy weights of books upon their shoulders, and go about their monastery bowing to the ground at every few steps, gnashing themselves with knives, etc. One of the poets (Tennyson) has commemorated Symeon in the following lines:—

"Bethink thee, Lord, whilst thou and all the saints Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth House in shade of comfortable roofs, Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, And wear warm clothes, and even the beasts have stalls, I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light, Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints; Or, in the night, after a little sleep, I wake; the chill stars sparkle; I am wet With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost. I wear an undressed goatskin on my back; A heavy, grazing iron collar grinds my neck; And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross, And strive and wrestle with thee till I die. Oh, mercy, mercy, wash away my sin!"

Now let no one imagine this to be a strongly colored picture of monkery. Take together the writings of Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, Palladius, Cassianus, Sulpicius, Severus, and Theodoret, and we have ample text for things much more to the discredit of monkery than this. But the Spirit draws the portrait of these men so unmistakably in Col. 2:23 that no one can affect not to recognize it. Again, in 1 Timothy 4, a near approaching defection is marked, when they should speak "lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving." Let my reader bear this text constantly in mind, for to it I shall hereafter frequently revert.

No ingenuous person will shut his eyes to the fact that the religiosi of the fourth century, to whom the marriage bed was altogether forbidden—but the majority of whom, according to their own revolting confessions, sometimes made in their very last days, denied not the baser lusts—whose principal tenet was to abstain from meats, which God has created to be received with thanksgiving, and who were one and all mastered by an illusion deep as midnight shades, which we will hereafter consider,—I say he will not deny that the portrait of the apostle is an exact portrait of the so-called saints of the Catholic Church of the fourth century.